Saudi Arabia to supply full Jan crude volumes to several Asian buyers

MOSCOW (MRC) — Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter, will supply full contractual volumes of crude to five North Asian refiners in January, unchanged from the previous month, five sources with direct knowledge of the matter said on Monday, as per Reuters.

Steady supply of Saudi oil to Asia will help meet robust demand in the region, with flows from places such as Europe and the United States slowing.

State oil company Saudi Aramco last week raised prices for all crude oil grades to Asia in January, in line with strong demand. The premium for flagship Arab Light crude was at its highest since September 2014, Reuters data showed.

The OPEC producer supplied full contractual volumes of crude to at least three North Asian refiners for December loading. But it trimmed supplies to at least three Japanese buyers and one in South Korea by up to 10% across different Saudi crude grades for November loading as maintenance at oilfields reduced output.

At least one North Asian refiner had not received its monthly allocation yet, a source familiar with the matter said, but added that Saudi Arabia was seen as willing to meet buyer demands.

All sources declined to be identified as they were not authorized to speak with media.
MRC

MOSCOW (MRC) — CB&I announced it has received full notice to proceed by Kazakhstan Petrochemical Industries Inc. (KPI) for the project management services for a propane dehydrogenation unit (PDH) and a polypropylene plant in the western Atyrau region of Kazakhstan, as per Hydrocarbonprocessing.

"We look forward to working with KPI through the provision of project management services on the different phases of this project and building on our experience in Kazakhstan," said Duncan Wigney, CB&I's Executive Vice President of Engineering & Construction. "This project is an excellent example of CB&I's integrated capabilities and the comprehensive solutions we offer to our customers in the region."

The PDH unit uses CB&I's CATOFIN propane dehydrogenation technology, and the polypropylene plant uses CB&I's Novolen advanced gas-phase polypropylene technology.
MRC

(MRC) — Royal Dutch Shell said a fire at its Singapore refinery-petrochemical site was extinguished on Sunday and no one was hurt in the incident, as per Reuters.

The fire occurred at one of its manufacturing units on Bukom Island at about 10 a.m. (0200 GMT) and was extinguished shortly after by the site's firefighters, a company spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

Shell was investigating the cause of the incident and did not expect any impact on its customers, she said.

Shell did not specify which unit had been affected.

The Bukom site, Shell's largest wholly-owned plant, has a 500,000-bpd refinery and a steam cracker that produces more than 900 Mtpy of ethylene.
MRC

MOSCOW (MRC) -- Axens completed the expansion of its Calvert City, Kentucky manufacturing plant to produce its Impulse hydroprocessing catalysts Series in North America, as per Apic-online.

Impulse is a complete range of high performance Hydrotreating catalysts offering higher flexibility and maximum throughput allowing to process even more difficult feedstock with higher end boiling point and longer cycles.

The Calvert City site will produce the full range of Impulse catalysts covering all domains from naphtha to VGO Hydrotreating and hydrocracker pretreatment. This is one of several sites with the capability to meet the global demand for Impulse catalysts.

As MRC wrote before, in 2016, Hengli Petrochemical (Dalian) Co. Ltd. (HPDC) let a contract to Axens SA, Rueil-Malmaison, France, to provide a suite of processing units and technologies for a grassroots crude-to-paraxylene complex under construction at its integrated refining and petrochemical project in Hengli Petrochemical Industrial Park (HPIP) on Changxing Island in Dalian, Liaoning Province, China, said Ogj.Alongside a final-conversion refinery designed to process 400,000 b/sd of crude oil into mostly naphtha, the refining complex also will include an aromatics plant that will maximize output of high-purity paraxylene to serve as feedstock for HPDC’s existing purified terephthalic acid (PTA) plants at HPIP.
MRC

MOSCOW (MRC) — Iraq's Oil Ministry has added a new processing unit to the Kirkuk oil refinery, increasing the plant’s capacity to 56,000 bpd, said Reuters citing the ministry.

The new production unit can process 13,000 bpd of crude, the statement said, citing Oil Minister Jabar al-Luaibi.

The new upgraded production capacity will meet most of the domestic need of the northern oil city of Kirkuk and nearby provinces and "save hard currency as a result of cutting fuel imports," it said.

Iraq is working to divert most future output from Kirkuk oilfield to local refineries due to an ongoing conflict with Kurdish regional authorities over the use of an export pipeline to Turkey.

Production from Kirkuk stopped in mid-October after Iraqi forces dislodged Kurdish fighters and took over the northern region’s oilfields.
MRC